Yes, rings look bright, because their brightness is enhanced.Rings are in fact barely visible. Original exposition times were 15.36 s for rings images (clear filter) and 0.72 (blue filter), 1.44 (green filter), 5.76 (orange filter) for Uranus images. Despite of these exp. times, rings were still very dark (much darker than Uranus).

Ever since the original data was released, it always seemed to me that the response was 'big bland boring ball......oooh look at that pretty Miranda over there!' Now that the planet has gone through equinox and we have Hubble and Keck etc, we know better, but still the popular assumption is that the planet is just a big featureless fuzzy ball.

Given that you are right, and that we are likely to see Neptune close up (Argo?) before we see Uranus close up, I for one am very interested in what you find in this dataset. Maybe with a bit of suitable processing it will surprise us all!

If you haven't seen it, you should check out Bjorn Jonsson's version of a Voyager Uranus image, posted with lots of his comments about processing. The key thing of interest in reply to antipode's post is that he found no features in the images that were significant enough to make it worthwhile to rotate the three frames in 3D space to align them before creating the color composite.

Also, regardless of whether Argo is selected, I think Neptune will be visited again before Uranus, because of Triton.

If you haven't seen it, you should check out Bjorn Jonsson's version of a Voyager Uranus image, posted with lots of his comments about processing. The key thing of interest in reply to antipode's post is that he found no features in the images that were significant enough to make it worthwhile to rotate the three frames in 3D space to align them before creating the color composite.

This is different from my Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune processing where I usually rotate the images in 3D space. For Uranus I didn't see the need for that as the features are very low contrast in OR, even more low contrast in GR and not visible at all in BL.

Uranus is no less interesting than Neptune in my opinion. Being visually bland doesn't make a planet uninteresting, it just makes it more difficult to explore. Comparing Uranus and the other the other big 3 there are interesting differences, for example Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune radiate significantly more energy into space than they receive from the sun while Uranus doesn't - it radiates hardly any excess heat. And with the exception of Triton, Uranus' satellite system is actually more interesting than Neptune's. Comparison with the Cassini results at Saturn would be interesting.

I have sometimes been a bit frustrated that Voyager 2 couldn't be launched a bit later (or technology developed faster) because then it could have carried a CCD camera sensitive to near-IR. The amount of visible details increases greatly with wavelength (comparing OR and BL there is a big difference) so I suspect Uranus would look highly interesting to a Cassini (or even Galileo) style imaging system in the near-IR.

This is extremly interesting, possibly the most interesting Voyager 2 image I have ever seen of Uranus. Now I wonder if there are any images of comparable resolution extending further 'down' and thus showing the bright feature better...

It's actually quite interesting to attempt to squeeze out some details from these images but having worked mainly on Cassini images recently the image quality really sucks. Here is a quick and dirty version of image C2682833.IMQ:

Some details are visible as well as various processing artifacts and noise. In particular, the concentric ellipses are processing artifacts. This is an orange filter image from directory URANUS\C2682XXX on Voyager volume 2 (the most interesting images are probably in this directory and the directories immediately preceding and following it). The orange filtered images seem to contain the greatest amount of details but some details are also visible in the green images.

Someone should probably be able to come up with an improved version of this one.

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